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Obama defends Larry Summers

First it was Susan Rice, his choice for secretary of state. Now, Larry Summers has withdrawn from consideration to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Their candidacies were so poorly handled that neither ever made it to the stage of being nominated, much less getting blocked — or voted down — by the Senate.

“So much for no-drama Obama,” said Jim Manley, a senior director at QGA Public Affairs who worked for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “This was always going to be a tough vote. There was no slam dunk involved here. … Why would they want to go through that?”

The Summers snafu is particularly problematic because the choice badly divided Obama’s fellow Democrats. Word from Hill allies was that the Senate could reject Summers, and already as many as four of the 12 Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee were ready to vote against him.

A larger question is of the president’s toughness. Liberal Democrats rallied against a Summers nomination. In another debate that never came up for a vote the White House could have easily lost, Obama was led into asking Congress for approval to bomb Syria. His summer-long fight with Russian President Vladimir Putin over NSA leaker Edward Snowden and the Syria issue has also hurt.

“It’s a consistent pattern where he says he’s going to do something, says he’s really going to fight for it, and then buckles the moment there’s any opposition,” said one veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s like the kiss of death if he wants if you for a job.”

White House officials see Summers and Rice as exceptions to the rule that Obama has been making progress on tough nominees. A showdown over Senate filibusters earlier this year led to the confirmations of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Todd Jones as chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Obama’s picks at the Environmental Protection Agency and Labor, Gina McCarthy and Tom Perez, respectively, were also confirmed despite some hand-wringing on Capitol Hill. And Sri Srinivasan sailed through the Senate to win a seat on the high-profile U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia earlier this year.

But it’s the picks that matter most to the president that have been most vexing for the White House. Obama seems willing to stretch — but only so far — for his personal friends, leaving fellow Democrats to either buck their own president or stick their necks out for nominees who can’t win confirmation.

“Sen. Reid, as a loyal foot soldier, will do whatever the president asked him to do,” Manley said. “But in the end, these are the president’s nominees and it’s up to him to round up the votes.”